115: Forty-Five

Hello and welcome back to the Big Who Listen! We’re here to listen to and talk about the Doctor Who audio dramas produced by Big Finish, and have some fun along the way.

Look out! The 7th Doctor, Ace and Hex are finally together again, and bringing with them a quartet of stories packed with danger and mystery…

Forty-Five is available to download for £7.99 here.

Four interlinked adventures in time and space to mark Doctor Who‘s 45th anniversary, featuring the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex.

In Egypt, archaeologist Howard Carter unearths an ancient secret buried in the Valley of the Kings. On an island of Mendolovinia, a deranged academic attempts to push back the frontiers of the human mind. In war-torn London, a cockney spiv takes possession of a bizarre alien object. And in a military bunker in the cold heart of Antarctica, the strangest and deadliest of the Doctor’s many enemies lies in wait…

False Gods by Mark Morris

In the blistering heat of the Egyptian desert Howard Carter and his team search for the lost tomb of Userhat, a servant of the god Amun. What they discover sheds new light on the history of the world as we know it.

Order of Simplicity by Nick Scovell

Dr Verryman has devoted his life to the advancement of knowledge. When his experiments on a remote planet threaten the entire human race only the Doctor can help – if he puts his mind to it.

Casualties of War by Mark Michalowski

Opportunity knocks in postwar London. But when a tea leaf steals from the wrong woman it becomes a race against time to discover the truth. Only some truths are best left untold.

The Word Lord by Steven Hall

In a top-secret military bunker deep beneath the Antarctic ice a mysterious death threatens peace negotiations and could spell disaster for the inhabitants of Earth. Can the Doctor cross the t’s and dot the i’s? Or will his efforts get lost in translation?

Sam Sheppard

Fans of Ace and Hex can breathe a sigh of relief: after a run of forgettable solo Seventh Doctor adventures which left me wondering whether Big Finish would ever get around to continuing the Forge storyline, the two characters have finally returned to the Main Range with Forty-Five. Released in November 2008 – which just so happened to be the 45th anniversary of Doctor Who – this anthology release consists of four loosely connected short stories, all of which have something to do with the number 45. In this review, I’ll be tackling these stories in ascending order, from worst to best.

And speaking of order, Order of Simplicity is very much the weakest part of this anthology. Written by Nick Scovell, this story sees the Doctor investigating a mysterious code which turns out to be a virus that robs the victim of their intelligence. While the idea of the Doctor’s mind being regressed is an intriguing and potentially frightening one, it feels like nothing interesting is actually done with it here; Order of Simplicity turns out to be a dull and underwhelming affair, and I’m not even sure how the Doctor actually dealt with the virus. On top of that, Ace and Hex are given nothing to do, and – depending on your point of view – Jon Glover’s performance as Dr Verryman is either entertainingly hammy or annoyingly over-the-top.

Honestly, if you want a 30 minute story about people being robbed of their intelligence, you should just go and watch that Futurama episode where the giant brains attack Earth. It’ll be a better use of your time.

By contrast, I actually enjoyed False Gods, in which Howard Carter and his team – including the mysterious Jane Templeton – are excavating the lost tomb of Userhat. Jane’s true identity makes for a decent plot twist, and the story’s climax is surprisingly strong; there’s some excellent acting from Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor is enraged by his own inability to avert Jane’s fate. So is this story a great one? Well, not quite. For one thing, I can’t help but feel like the inclusion of Howard Carter was pretty much pointless: the big ticket attraction of “Benedict Cumberbatch as Howard Carter” is wasted on this story, which does nothing of note with either the actor or the historical figure. There was no real reason why Howard Carter should have tagged along; similarly, Ace and Hex don’t really get much to do here.

If the entire anthology had been on the same level of quality as these two stories, I could easily have dismissed Forty-Five as an inoffensive but largely skippable release. Fortunately, things begin to improve in this anthology’s second half, beginning with Casualties of War. Set in London at the end of World War Two, the story revolves around the Doctor’s efforts to track down a dangerous alien artefact which has fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous black market dealer. Things get more complicated when the trail leads the Doctor, Ace and Hex to Ace’s mother Audrey, who we last saw in The Curse of Fenric and is now a young child. On the whole, Casualties of War is a highly effective story which offers some good character moments for Ace, as well as a welcome hint that Big Finish does actually intend to follow up on the plot threads of Hex’s mother and the Forge at some point.

As a fan of detective fiction, I enjoy a good locked room mystery – and The Word Lord, the final story in this anthology, is definitely a good locked room mystery. When the Doctor, Ace and Hex land in a secure, technologically advanced bunker in Antarctica, 2045, the Doctor is tasked with solving the seemingly impossible murder of an American consul – an event which could have devastating geopolitical ramifications. What follows is a taut, highly effective thriller which ties all the stories in the anthology together and introduces a genuinely creative new threat: the villainous Nobody No-One, a “Word Lord” whose powers are based on language and wordplay, which makes for a particularly clever and memorable storyline.

(I was actually reminded of Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” books, and in a way, it’s kind of a shame that Nobody No-One doesn’t feature in an actual book, where some truly inventive and meta things could be done with his powers).

If nothing else, The Word Lord alone makes Forty-Five worth the price of admission – and it’s good to see Ace and Hex back in the Main Range. While this anthology was uneven at best, I’m hoping that it’ll turn out to be the beginning of a return to form for the Seventh Doctor, whose adventures have recently suffered from a lack of direction (as evidenced by all the underwhelming solo stories we’ve had to sit through). The mention of the Forge and the introduction of Nobody No-One certainly seem to suggest that big developments are in store for the Doctor, Ace and Hex – but we’ll have to wait and see how things turn out…

Adam Kendrick

Following the success of Circular Time and 100, the Seventh Doctor finally received his own anthology in November 2008, which reunited him with Ace and Hex after a series of underwhelming solo adventures. Forty-Five consists of four 30-minute stories by different writers and since this audio’s release coincided with the forty-fifth anniversary of An Unearthly Child, they all incorporate the number 45 in their own ways. (Originally, I wanted to keep this theme going by writing exactly forty-five words for each story, but this gimmick turned out to be needlessly restrictive, so I decided to ignore this arbitrary word limit.) Be aware that these summaries are spoiler-heavy, so if you just want to know which stories I enjoyed, skip ahead to the final paragraph.

False Gods – The Seventh Doctor, Hex, and Ace investigate a time disruption originating near the Valley of the Kings in 1902. There, tomb KV45 is being excavated by a team of archaeologists overseen by Howard Carter, played by Benedict Cumberbatch of all people. (Apparently, producer David Richardson gave him an extended lunch break so that he could audition for Sherlock while recording this audio!) However, Carter ultimately gets upstaged by his assistant Jane, who is revealed to be a Gallifreyan student who became stranded on Earth during a field trip, accidentally became worshipped as a god, and is now trying to recover her dying TARDIS thousands of years later. A frothy pseudohistorical that pretty much wastes Howard Carter as a historical figure, but there’s some good moments, such as some encounters with a security droid and a prehistoric creodont, Hex reflecting on the Doctor’s ability to witness someone’s entire life at once, and Sylvester McCoy delivering a surprising amount of rage during the story’s climax.

Order of Simplicity – It’s a dark and stormy night, and the Seventh Doctor has brought Hex and Ace to a creepy mansion where scientific experiments are underway. He’s responding to a request from Dr. Verryman, a mad scientist who needs assistance with solving a mysterious code. In fact, this code turns out to be an encrypted virus that apparently makes you as stupid as homo erectus, “possessing an average IQ of just 45”. (This isn’t entirely true: we know that these archaic humans were hunter-gatherers who used fire and tools.) To make matters worse, the Doctor has already been infected as a result of simply reading the code! Of the four stories, this is by far the weakest: it’s mostly dreary exposition and pseudoscientific nonsense, but Jon Glover’s hammy performance as the egotistical Verryman makes it somewhat listenable.

Casualties of War – It’s 1945 and the Seventh Doctor is tracking down alien artefacts in Streatham, London during VE Day celebrations. The trail of psionic energy leads him and his companions to 17 Old Terrace, Streatham – the same house where Ace’s mother Audrey grew up. As we all know from The Curse of Fenric, Ace had a very difficult relationship with her mum, but Casualties of War becomes an opportunity for Ace to see Audrey in a new light and make peace with her past. It also manages to resurrect the Forge storyline, which had been on hiatus ever since No Man’s Land; the fact Hex comes very close to discovering the truth about his mother indicates that Big Finish hasn’t completely forgotten about this arc. A short and simple tale with key character moments and emotional depth – despite how Audrey is clearly being played by an adult woman whose voice has been pitched upwards rather than an actual child.

The Word Lord – The year is 2045 and there’s been a murder in a high-security Antarctic bunker located 450 miles away from civilisation. The Seventh Doctor, Hex, and Ace have just 45 minutes to solve the mystery and prevent a diplomatic incident. While reviewing the base’s audio recordings, the Doctor notices that the number forty-five has been cropping up an awful lot recently and it’s not long until this pattern is revealed to be the work of a Word Lord called Nobody No-One – a psychotic interdimensional entity who only obeys the laws of language and communication. (Kind of like The Toymaker, but with linguistics instead of games.) The most fascinating audio of the four, The Word Lord introduces a powerful new foe for the Seventh Doctor and succeeds in tying the whole anthology together. It might wrap up just when things start getting good, but the cliffhanger ending suggests that we haven’t heard the last of Nobody…

Overall, Forty-Five is a perfectly cromulent anthology: Order of Simplicity is mediocre and skippable, False Gods is recommended for Benedict Cumberbatch fans, Casualties of War is significant for Ace, and The Word Lord is the standout finale. All four stories are short but sweet, and although they don’t reach the dizzying heights of Winter or My Own Private Wolfgang, they at least put the Doctor, Ace, and Hex trio back on track after the farce of The Dark Husband. Oh, and you can even download the fourth and best story from the Big Finish website and listen to it for free.

Giles Allen-Bowden

Hello Big Finish speedrunners! If you’re racing through either the chronological release order or just going through Seven/Ace/Hex’s story range and looking for the essential stories only then this review is entirely for you. Forty-Five features four stories of varying quality, let’s see how many of them you need going forward and which you can afford to skip if the overarching story / character development is your main priority.  

False Gods AND Order of Simplicity – Entirely skippable

Neither of these stories advance the characters or the overarching plot an inch, they are entirely stand-alone stories which your mileage will vary on. False Gods adds some historical intrigue with Howard Carter of famed Egyptology fame making an appearance and if you’ve been missing Ace and Hex alongside Seven then this will at least get you in the mood for more of their antics together. Order of Simplicity meanwhile is like if somebody reheated the evolution-themed leftovers from Ghost Light, resulting in a very bland meal that tastes more of microwave than the original meal.

Casualties of War – Character essential

Speaking of Season 26 stories, this is the closest you will ever get in the Main Range to a story which follows up on Ace’s character growth in regards to her own family history last featured in The Curse of Fenric. While the great conspiracies and bombshell revelations of Seven/Ace/Hex are there but teetered around rather than fully delved into, what is here in spades is character growth and introspection and for those reasons alone it’s worth a listen.

The Word Lord – Unskippable

If you only listen to one story in Forty-Five, make it this one. Not only is this story vital for upcoming adventures in establishing a key antagonistic force, but it’s easily the best story out of the lot, as well as one of the cleverest and most fun Seventh Doctor outing in aeons. Tying together the various “forty-five” mentions into a neat bow and featuring an extremely clever concept, this story is your essential homework for your release. Even if you don’t have time for Casualties or Gods, do not pass on The Word Lord. It’s a masterclass in 30 minute storytelling which every writer trying to write in the same format should note.     

And that’s it for Seven/Ace/Hex in 2008, not much in terms of content but it’s better than nothing and the anthology format does at least mean you get multiple flavours of story in a single release rather than one single blob which if it’s Nocturne shaped is dull and unflattering to the ear. Thankfully we don’t have long to wait now for this story to reach its zenith and deliver exactly the stories Seven was always capable of, he just didn’t know it yet.

James Ashway

Back in 2008, Doctor Who celebrated its first anniversary while it was on screen in more than 20 years. While the 45th anniversary wasn’t marked on television, Big Finish put out Forty-Five, an anthology teaming up the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex for their first adventures since the dire Dark Husband. While it’s nowhere near as bad a story as David Quantick’s offering, Forty-Five is yet another swing and a miss for this TARDIS team.

The first of the four one partners is False Gods, where the TARDIS crew meet Howard Carter many years before he would open Tutankhamun’s tomb. There’s nothing overly wrong with the story, with Benedict Cumberbatch well cast as the aforementioned archaeologist, but it doesn’t get the anniversary release off with a bang. It’s all competently written, but really not much beyond that. The conclusion feels a little undeserved, with the story coming to a somewhat abrupt end to wrap things up neatly within 25 minutes. Would it have done better with more time? Possibly. In all, the best thing that can be said about it was that Big Finish allowed Benedict Cumberbatch to have a long lunch break so that he could audition for Sherlock, allowing his star to rise and perform to much larger audiences.

Next up is Order of Simplicity, which is comfortably the worst of the set. While it starts interestingly enough, with the TARDIS team arriving to investigate a mysterious code, it quickly descends into lots of people doing silly voices over a plot that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Benedict Cumberbatch, like Giles Brandreth before him, is wasted as a droning, unintelligible monster, while there’s not much good to say about the rest of the performances. In the end, everything explodes, and that’s probably for the best.

The third story, Casualties of War, is one that has a lot of good elements, but doesn’t quite put them together. It’s the only story in the boxset that actually advances any of the plot threads that the Seventh Doctor, Hex and Ace have built up during their time together, but with only 25 minutes to do it in, there’s just not enough space. This is the only story that definitely felt like it needed more time, allowing for a better paced VE Day adventure with the TARDIS crew. As it is, the story has its moments, but these are offset by a few clangers, like our heroes being allowed to leave at the end for no particular reason. Hex also decides to ignore some particularly important revelations from the Doctor, probably so a longer story can go into them in more detail.

The only total success in this boxset is The Word Lord, the final story of Forty-Five. As you might have guessed from the title, this story presents the interesting premise of the Word Lords, a group of being similar to the Time Lords who deal with the power of language instead. It’s a neat premise, and one that’s perfectly suited to being just 25 minutes long. That said, it manages to get a lot done. The TARDIS team are thrown straight into a murder mystery, with plenty of witty dialogue and emotional moments to carry things along. The character of Claire Spencer, a military figure with a previous connection to the Doctor, is particularly well used, allowing The Word Lord to pull comfortably ahead of the other releases in this set.

Considering all four stories together, it seems once again like Big Finish weren’t entirely certain what to do with the Seventh Doctor at this point in time. While it seems like our days of the Seventh Doctor are now over, it would be nice if what were one of the most dynamic TARDIS crews on audio could rediscover what made them work in the first place.

John Ashway

It’s time for another anthology release of four individual one-part stories, this time ostensibly to celebrate forty five years of Doctor Who – although the only element to show that is the repeated appearance of the titular number. We’ve got the 7th Doctor, Ace and Hex all back together, which is grand after such a long break since their last adventure, but as we’ll get into, I’m not sure this is the greatest reunion for the team…

We start with False Gods, which sees the Doctor and Co arrive at an early expedition by Howard Carter. He’s played by future Hollywood mega star Benedict Cumberbatch, so quite a retrospective coup – which makes it feel even more baffling in hindsight that I’m  not sure why Howard Carter is in this story at all, it’s really not about him! Instead we have a story that begins as a series of seemingly random events, like alien wolf attacks and unexpected time warps, and turns out to mainly be about Galllifreyan bureaucracy and bad school trip planning. The ending is supposed to be tragic but feels entirely avoidable and forced. As a whole, the story left me longing for the next time Doctor Who tries to do a Howard Carter story, preferably one where he plays a major role!

Order of Simplicity is the second adventure, and while this one has a much clearer tone and sense of purpose than the first, it is quite ironically, too simple for its own good. While the Doctor tries to solve a deadly equation that could destroy everyone’s brains, Ace and Hex desperately search for a subplot they can meaningfully contribute to. The best they can manage is finding a drooling, mentally reduced Benedict Cumberbatch in the cupboard. The day is saved not by a clever twist or the companions coming up with a new approach to the problem, but by the Doctor doing some technobabble and the story is over now. One bonus point is allotted for the over-the-top Scottish villainess who seems to be having a good time.

Things get better, but still a bit underbaked in Casualties of War, a story that almost provides developments for Ace and Hex, but ultimately chickens out. Our heroes have arrived in Perivale after the Second World War, so Ace is again brought into contact with her mother Audrey, this time as a young child. But her grandmother Kathleen, who we met in The Curse of Fenric, is out for the length of the story, so instead we spend time with a never mentioned before or since aunt and cousin of the family, so what’s really the point? Said cousin has gotten a hold of a dangerous device from the Forge – here represented by an agent played by Beth Chalmers. With the Doctor forced by alien tech to admit a dark secret to Hex, it looks like this storyline might finally be going somewhere- but Hex simply dismisses the revelation as a clever lie. This reminded me of the similar flim-flam going on with Charley’s secret in Brotherhood of the Daleks. If you’re not ready to move things on, that’s fine, but don’t walk back a key dramatic moment!

Finally, we end the quadrilogy with The Word Lord, the only story here I can fully recommend. It’s a clever little thriller with an imaginative concept, as repeated words and phrases hint at a terrible evil about to be let loose at a key peace conference. Without giving too much of this twist-based story away, our TARDIS team are challenged by an unusual and very powerful enemy, and there are some harrowing moments where they simply can’t stop death from occurring around them. This is undoubtedly the highlight of the set, and would almost justify a purchase in itself – if Big Finish hadn’t made this story available for free on its own! So perhaps leave the rest of Forty-Five on the shelf, and save yourself a few quid.